Pest brings tremendous losses, by invading houses or buildings and damaging to buildings and facilities, giving unpleasant feelings to residents, and carrying germs and pathogenic organisms. Accordingly, various methods for exterminating and preventing pest and their invasion have been proposed. Herein, the term “pest” represents all harmful insects and animals, such as cockroaches, ants, rats and weasels, and harmful birds.
In a conventional pest control method, a pest control service technician (hereinafter, “service technician”) visits a building (hereinafter, “pest control subject site”) and understands the situation by personally investigating the circumstances and interviewing the residents, and takes measures for pest control accordingly.
A problem with the conventional method is that it is difficult to obtain detailed information with respect to the ecology of the pest inside the pest control subject site, such as invasion paths of the pest, location of activity, types, chemicals to which the pest have tolerance, unless the service technician personally visits and closely investigates the site. In case a pest control measure is established by obtaining information through site visits, a large cost of human resources and extra expenses are incurred. Further, the amount and credibility of information with regard to the pest and the efficiency of the pest control are very dependent on the skill of the individual service technicians.
To resolve such problems, automated systems and methods, which enable a service technician to know the status of pest without visiting a pest control subject site, have been proposed. These conventional systems and methods, however, lack means for effectively performing pest control. Especially, these conventional systems and methods do not consider characteristics of zones or sections in a building even though the appearance and activity of the pest may be different from zone to zone in the same pest control subject site, according to the circumstances of each site. Accordingly, even if information required to perform pest control is obtained, the efficiency of the pest control may not be optimized since the obtained information is not systematically managed for each zone in a building. For example, when revisiting the pest control subject site, the service technician has to check again each location where the appearance of the pest is detected. Otherwise, he has to apply the pest control measure to the whole pest control subject site even when only some zones or sections in that building are invaded by the pest despite of inefficiency and excessive use of chemicals.